650 Group Blog

We attended Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCa) in Los Angeles, CA this week, as well as the AT&T Spark event in San Francisco. Since 5G is launching first the US, these two events became the public events where significant 5G-related announcements happened.

Verizon. Will launch 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) on October 1 in four markets: Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento.

AT&T. The company reiterated its own 5G plans (mobile 5G by year-end 2018 in cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Raleigh, Waco, Houston, Jacksonville, Lousville, New Orleans and San Antonia), plus it made some announcements like that it is beginning 5G-ready CBRS equipment testing (using Samsung CBRS equipment and CommScope as SAS provider). Also, at the Spark event on Monday, the company announced three strategic telecom equipment suppliers, Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung.

T-Mobile. Announced that it had completed a Cisco vEPC system (upgradeable to 5G Core) carrying traffic for 70M users that was from Cisco. It also announced that it signed a $3.5B 5G agreement with Ericsson. This is in addition to the July 30 announcement made earlier with Nokia for $3.5B, as well. Generally, the company has set expectations as recently as September 10 that it will provide nationwide 5G by the year 2020.

Additionally, discussions about spectrum in the US market were very active discussions. Some points we picked up on:

No new mid-band auctions will occur in the US market for another 2-3 years, so this means that new capacity is going to come from LAA (just announced on the iPhone Xs this week, as well) and from CBRS (discussed above).

The "who has the fastest 5G throughput" battle will be won at the millimeter wave. In other words, using millimeter was, speeds as high as 10 Gbps are possible, but with mid-band (1-6 Ghz), where LTE is currently deployed, cannot go much over 2 Gbps. So, to beat the Ookla Speed Test, the mobile operators who deploy mmWave early will get a leg up. However, in order to deploy mmWave, these have to be small-cells that are within 100 meters of users. Since it is so difficult to get real-estate rights and backhaul for small cells, this is going to be a big challenge. Nevertheless, this is how the battle will be won.

Yesterday, Ericsson and Juniper announced plans to partner to tackle 5G transport challenges together. Additionally, Ericsson announced a partnership with optical transport company, ECI. The companies said that Ericsson's Router 6000 product family will focus on fronthaul and backhaul and edge compute and will be complemented by Juniper MX, PTX and SRX Series portfolios providing edge, core and security capabilities. Additionally, in today's presentation to analysts, Ericsson showed that the overall transport capability from Ericsson will also include Optical Transport from both ECI Telecom and Ciena. The Ericsson Network Manager will be capable of managing not only Ericsson products, but also the three families of products from Juniper.

ECI will be used for Metro, and will be completely integrated with the Ericsson OSS platform. The company conceded that it is de-emphasizing its in-house metro optical product line and focusing on ECI. Ciena will be used for long-haul transport predominantly, mainly the Ciena 6500 product. Ericsson concedes that both ECI and Ciena products can move to other domains.

To enable automation for 5G, Ericsson can only guarantee that networks working with Ericsson and its partners can successfully be automated. This automation / partnership topic illustrates just how complex it will be to make 5G networks work properly.

Recall that Ericsson and Juniper had a close partnership that goes back many years. In fact, the Juniper router predecessor to the MX was used as the underlying hardware for Ericsson's very important GGSN/SGSN and later EPC capabilities. Ericsson eventually replaced the Juniper product for EPC with its own Router 6000. Subsequently, Ericsson announced a partnership with Cisco, which was more general in nature. That relationship did not result in much tangible progress, from what we have learned; and the relationship was done under previous management teams for both Cisco and Ericsson. Ericsson explained today in its analyst briefing that Cisco and Ericsson compete in several areas. So, this new Juniper relationship is important in that it re-kindles an old relationship and plays to both companies' strengths.

We attended the Nokia Fixed Broadband group analyst meeting in Tokyo last week and found that the company’s portfolio is expanding rapidly. The company’s view is that capital spending at its customers will be flat in future, and therefore the company is taking the approach to grow its portfolio beyond its core DSL and Optical core to potentially allow it grow revenues. It has expanded its product line to include cable (from Gainspeed acquisition), more recently home WiFi (augmented through acquisitions) and is rolling out Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). The company is also predicting that the Indian subcontinent and fixed network wholesaling will become significant opportunities for the Nokia Fixed Network group.

Cable. Admits that it took a year longer for DAA to develop. In deployment phase at WOW! And we get the sense that there are some significant wins that Nokia could announce in the future. It claims to be the only vendor with DAA available today.

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA). The company is offering two versions of FWA: The company is offering two versions of FWA: (a) 3GPP radio access network based and (d) unlicensed WiGig (60 Ghz WiFi-based). The company expects 5G-based solutions to hit the market in 2019. The company’s first FWA customer is an enterprise, using WiGig. But, the main focus is on large Service Providers. The company is not focusing on Wireless ISPs (WISPs).

WiFi. Nokia is making a push to enhance its Broadband CPE portfolio to include more advanced WiFi capabilities. It is launching a “mesh” capability that will become popular across its broadband CPE product line. Mesh is a very popular router category that has been propelling growth for vendors such as eero and Google.

Additionally, Nokia emphasized an enabling technology to allow fixed network wholesaling - slicing. The company has begun discussing Altiplano, an SDAN (Software Defined Access Network) system. This allows multiple service providers to share the same fiber and equipment installed base. The company’s view is that just like mobile network tower sharing happened to reduce capital spending, the same will happen with Fixed Broadband networks – but this requires a virtualization technology such as SDAN.